March 30th, 2005

“We want to provide Web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users’ experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google.

March 29th, 2005

An internet entrepreneur is taking legal action against computer giant Apple over the iTunes domain name.

Benjamin Cohen, 22, registered itunes.co.uk in 2000, but earlier this month the UK domain name registry, Nominet, handed the name over to Apple.

Mr Cohen, of Hackney, east London, has applied to the High Court for a judicial review, saying Nominet is biased against small businesses.

But Nominet say legal experts found Mr Cohen was abusing his registration.

The body’s judgement, dated the 10 March, states by offering to sell the domain name and by continuing to re-direct people from itunes.co.uk Mr Cohen is abusing his registration.

“The domain name, in the hands of the respondent [Mr Cohen], is an abusive registration on the grounds of its use in a manner taking unfair advantage of, and being unfairly detrimental to, the rights of the complainant [Apple].”

Mr Cohen claims not to have heard of Apple’s iTunes music download service until after it was launched last year. Yeah right. And the BBC is linking to his lame dotcom.

March 21st, 2005

Ask Jeeves is the fifth most-queried search engine in the US and has a market value of $1.43bn, one tenth the size of Mr Diller’s IAC/InterActive.

Mr Diller said Ask Jeeves “has the potential to become one of the great brands on the internet”. The deal reflects rising competition between rival internet search engines.

“We are a small player in the land of the giants,” said Adrian Cox, chief executive of Ask Jeeves’ UK operations.

Mr Cox explained that the deal would provide Ask Jeeves with the financing and resources needed to continue its current “aggressive” growth rate.
He continued that the firm was confident of its ability to compete with rivals such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN Search.

March 18th, 2005

Advertisers will be able to buy keywords on MSN’s search page soon with the launch of MSN adCenter.

The service will be unveiled later today by Yusuf Mehdi, VP of MSN Information Services and Merchant Platform division, at MSN’s customer summit in Redmond.

The service is likely to be similar to that offered by Google and Yahoo! – advertisers pay so their adverts appear when a surfer searches for a particular word. MS claims the system will include detailed audience information such as location, gender, age group and lifestyle segment. MS believes this will allow advertisers to improve advertising strategy and improve click-through rates.

The service will be trialled in France and Singapore for six months before any wider rollout.